I have finally arrived at the “design” phase of my gardening lifeline.
After stumbling through the “have a go” chapter, I graduated to the “education” stage, which merged into the “collector” phase, resulting in a garden that is a somewhat chaotic, but lovable mish-mash.
Now I am in the hunt for atmosphere.

With a closer look, I recognised how gardeners reflect their personal style with plant curation, to achieve atmospheres that might be considered traditional, structured, wild or whimsical. Not so different from what is achieved with architecture and interior decoration.
Inspired by some specific gardens and the fabulous central city planting in Christchurch, I have found a particular design movement that attracts me.

“Flaxmere”, the North Canterbury garden of Penny Zino and her naturalistic area inspired by her workshop with Piet Oudolf in The Netherlands six years ago.

The New Perennial Movement has a foot in ecology, site-specific planting and celebrating plants as features throughout each stage of their lifeline. Overall, It is an effort to create gardens that both mimic and are in unity with nature, often referred to as “prairie”, “meadow” or “wild”-style planting. Northern Hemisphere examples (the style has become very popular in Europe, UK and North America) commonly weave soft grasses through drifts of flowering perennials, chosen to give interest as the seasons progress.
Interesting mixes of form and colour, through blooms, seed heads and foliage, result in a kind of large-scale, artful, living canvas. There’s no rush to chop and tidy in autumn; instead, gardeners find beauty in the skeletal, textural and muted scene the planting finds in the seasonal cooling. A large scale cut back usually occurs in late winter.

Beyond the initial visual results, these gardens mix together plants that respond well to their specific environment, planting tightly to reduce weeds and providing a living habitat to support insects, pollinators and birds.

While everything is planted with precision, the aim is to offer an impression that this space has occurred “naturally” – which is almost never the case, given plants are often interesting exotics mixed with natives of the region. As Robyn Kilty, a well-known New Zealand garden designer and writer put it:

“ Naturalistic gardens are those which look as though they have just appeared as in a natural landscape. However, a garden, whether it is called naturalistic or not, by the mere fact of being a garden, is always moulded by the hand of man and not nature.”

— Robyn Kilty

Intrigued by this “new” style of planting, six years ago Kilty and fellow celebrated gardener Penny Zino, set off for a workshop in The Netherlands with the designer best-known for spotlighting and expanding the concept in recent times – Piet Oudolf. Oudolf is the creator of world-famous New Perennial Movement examples that include New York’s High Line, Hauser and Wirth in England and his own garden of 40 years at Hummelo in The Netherlands.
The principles of the approach differ greatly to the traditional European styles that arrived in New Zealand with colonialism, and the pair sought to understand how these might be translated in their South Island spaces. Kilty with her very small urban garden in Christchurch and Zino with 3ha in rural North Canterbury.

Piet Oudolf designer; Hauser and Wirth, Somerset, England in springtime. Taken by Penny Zino.

While some Northern Hemisphere interpretations are true reflections of naturally occurring wild areas, a New Zealand example of a naturalistic garden “would more likely be a garden of native trees and shrubs as in native bush, where most species are unique and endemic to New Zealand and nowhere else”, said Kilty. We have very few native flowering perennials, and most of those that do flower tend towards white. This presents a challenge if only New Zealand natives are selected in creating the attractive tapestry that is a hallmark of this style. The opportunity for mixing our natives with exotics reveals the greatest creative potential.

“I love the softness and the etherealness of naturalistic gardens” said Zino. “In my case, nothing over a metre was the general rule, as it would be flattened in the winds we have. It is a way of gardening that can be so individual and therefore can be suited to a range of conditions.”

— Penny Zino

“I love the way it moves in the wind, the grasses coming into their flowering season add so much and, later, with seed heads forming, it is magical. All this can be done using our native grasses, which is another reason it appeals, as these gardens will take on a different look to what you see in Europe, or other places. It can feel as if it belongs here. I love the individuality of the different colours of the perennials winding their way across an area.”

Zino has encountered challenges along the way. There’s the problematic self-seeding of some selected plants versus the shorter life span of others, and combining plants that have the same watering needs in the hunt for as little water use as possible, which is also a top priority of the concept. Even, on reflection, realising that her initial planting wasn’t tight enough to work against weeds.

As she herself has admitted, this is all part of the spontaneous nature of the approach and is the constant balancing act of exploring gardening.

As I look out to my back lawn, where the future planned garden edges are marked with the soft curves of a hose, I feel a return of the trepidation I felt when planting my first garden-centre seedlings in the ground.
This will be my power move in fully embracing the idea that my garden can deliver on my personal style and vision, as much as my decorated living room. It will be a matter of keeping up the research, accepting the volatile and experimental nature of working with living things and remembering that the process is as creative and rewarding as the eventual results.

This article was first featured in my Stuff ‘Homed’ gardening column for beginners and The Press on June 3rd 2021
All words are my own. Images of Penny Zino’s garden; Flaxmere were taken by me while the images of Hauser and Wirth were supplied by Penny Zino and printed with persmission.

Studio Home Blog

An introduction to the New Perennial Movement

Studio Home